Specter

1

The figure slid ashore with the roll of the surf, garbed all in black, glistening in the wan light of a new-risen last-quarter moon partly masked by scattered clouds, and with the oily sheen of phosphorescence off the sea. It might have been an oil-coated chunk of flotsam washed in by the tide — or a corpse — but the eyes, the whites like ice behind the nonreflective plate of the face mask, were very much alive, shifting back and forth to scan the length of beach.

The next wave brought a second armed and black-clad figure ashore, five meters to the left. The first signaled the second with silent, slashing movements of one hand Check that way.

Both figures clutched knapsacks before them as though black nylon could provide cover from hostile fire; both held the sleek, black deadliness of HK MP5SD3 submachine guns in gloved hands. The men lay belly-down in the sand as surf boiled and frothed around their bodies, using the knapsacks as firing rests for their weapons' muzzle-heavy barrels.

The beach, barely visible in the uncertain moonlight, looked deserted save for those two figures. A line of poplars, dimly visible against moon-brightened clouds, marked the side of a highway paralleling the coast to the north, thirty meters ahead.

Thunder boomed and rumbled in the distance. To the left, westward, the sky was aglow with light reflected from low-lying clouds, light that wavered and flickered like the pulse of distant lightning.

Lieutenant Blake Murdock slithered a few more meters up the beach, then, still alert for movement or any sign of life, stripped off his face mask. From a waterproof pouch in the knapsack, he extracted an AN/PVS-7 night-vision device and slipped it down over his head.

They weighed a pound and a half and they sharply reduced his field of vision, but when the NVD goggles were switched on they pierced near-total darkness, transforming it into green-tinted day. Details hidden at first by darkness sprang into sharp relief a low stone wall at the top of the beach; a small fishing boat pulled up on the sand a hundred meters to the east; the seashore clutter of civilization — lumps of sea-hardened oil, plastic six-pack rings, crumpled aluminum cans, tangles of fish line or plastic net, plastic jugs — marking the tide line between wet and dry sand. The beach, as expected, was empty. Satellite surveillance suggested that this strip of the Dalmatian coast east of Dubrovnik was at best only intermittently patrolled.

Murdock checked his swim buddy, who stared back at him with the hard-edged, mechanical-insect face of a man wearing NVD goggles. Chief Machinist's Mate Tom "Razor" Roselli gave Murdock a gloved thumbs-up Looks clear.

Murdock signaled back: Affirmative — move out.

Flat on their bellies, the two men crawled the rest of the way up the beach until they reached the shelter of the seawall, where they stashed fins, face masks, and rebreathers. Both wore black nomex flight suits over wet suits. It was late winter, and both air and sea were bitingly cold despite the warm, southerly surface current off the Dalmatian coast. Murdock could feel the first signs of exposure after his long swim, the tingling numbness in his fingers, the faint trembling of his lower lip. He'd endured far worse than this during BUD/S training, though, a calculated set of tortures and privations that had shown just how far he could push himself in the wet and cold. He could keep on pushing for a long time yet.

He had to. They still had a long way to go.

Roselli produced a Global Positioning System receiver and carefully studied its luminous digital readout. After a moment, he snapped Murdock a thumbs-up. Their trip north in a CRRC from the U.S.S. Nassau, followed by a two-kilometer swim in ink-black water, had put them ashore precisely on target.

Communicating solely by gesture, the two black figures separated, crawling in opposite directions until they were twenty meters apart. Chemical light sticks, pulled from their packs and ignited with a shake, were planted in the sand, their pale green luminescence marking a landing zone visible only from the sea.

Then the two men settled down to silently watch… and wait.

They were U.S. Navy SEALS, members of the elite, high-tech warrior teams that took their name from the acronym for SEa, Air, and Land. Blake Murdock, the commanding officer of the Third Platoon, SEAL Team Seven, had been the platoon leader for nearly eight months now.

He crouched in the sand, alive to the night, to the stink of garbage and rotting fish on the beach, to the chill of the offshore breeze cooling his soggy flight suit, to the rough, gritty hardness of the stone wall pressed against his back. Though unusual and officially discouraged, the practice of having a CO come ashore first on an op was not unheard of in the Teams. During the Vietnam War, many SEAL platoon leaders regularly took point, officially because they could react more swiftly to the unexpected from that position. Few SEALs cared for official reasons, though, and the truth of the matter was that taking point was just one more way of demonstrating the special bond most SEAL officers shared with their men. Murdock had trained constantly with his people since assuming command of Third Platoon. More, he'd been in combat with them. Being first man ashore on a hostile beach was nothing compared to that.

Besides, he'd wanted to assess the situation himself, through his own eyes, before committing the rest of the squad.

The pulsing glow to the west brightened and quickened, and seconds later, the far-thunder rumble grew louder, more insistent. Some of the light took on a silver-white tinge — artillery flares, Murdock thought — mingled with the flash of antiaircraft tracers and the sullen, ember-red illumination of burning buildings. The Serbs were shelling the port city of Dubrovnik. Again. The rumble of the bombardment sounded like that of a summer storm, save that it went on and on, without letup.

Damn them, Murdock thought, but he wasn't even sure who he was damning most at the moment the dozens of militia and warlord factions that were so bloodily intent on carving up the mountainous territory of what had once been Yugoslavia, or the Washington bureaucrats and politicians who seemed so pathetically unable to do anything at all about the ongoing slaughter.

This latest round in the age-old bloodshed involving the Balkan's religious, ethnic, and political factions had been going on virtually without letup for several years now. The power vacuum left by the collapse of Communism in Europe had led to increasingly violent clashes among the patchwork states and populations that over eighty years earlier had given the world a new word balkanization. Serbs and Croats, Bosnians and Albanians, Slovenians and Montenegrans, Muslims and Christians, Monarchists and Communists, and more seemed hell-bent on drowning these ancient mountains in blood. So far, the United States, NATO, and the United Nations all had failed repeatedly to find a peaceful solution; and with each failure, the possibility that the fighting in the Balkans would touch off a larger, bloodier European war — as it had in 1914 — loomed larger, more certain, more deadly.

To make matters worse, U.S. foreign policy had been unusually inept lately. The current Administration vacillated almost comically between chest-puffing bluster and appeasement, threatening air strikes one week, calling for sanctions and no-fly zones the next, then promising political concessions and millions in foreign aid after that. The indecisiveness bitterly angered Murdock, as it did most of the men in the Teams. Hell, the tragedy now playing itself out, especially up the coast to the west, was enough to leave anyone with a love of America and of history furious. Modern Dubrovnik had once been an independent city-state republic called Ragusa, the first foreign government in the world to recognize the infant United States of America in 1776. If ever a place deserved meaningful help from the U.S., it was Dubrovnik.

Murdock had first learned that historical tidbit while watching a news special on ACN about the fighting in Bosnia and Croatia, and he'd researched it some on his own since. The son of a U.S. congressman from Virginia, he had been unable to grow up without acquiring a love of American history that delighted in squirreling away such nuggets. If nothing else, his knowledge of history often gave him a reassuring sense of who he was and what he was doing. Unfortunately, it could also lead to intense frustration when he saw people who should have known better proving Santayana's maxim Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

Still, Murdock was realist enough to know that it was irresponsible to launch a war over what amounted to ancient history. The real crime was that Washington could not decide on a single course of action and then stick to it. As always, the real victims of that indecisiveness were the civilians, the innocents caught at ground zero… and the American combat forces committed piecemeal to the meat grinder, usually with no clear goals and no definite or coherent policy.

Headlights flared down the road to the east, and Murdock and Roselli hunkered down lower, invisible in the wall's shadow. A moment later, a truck rumbled past on the highway meters beyond the wall; a heavy vehicle from the sound of it, almost certainly military. With a clash of badly worn gears, the noise dwindled away toward the west. Probably a truck carrying supplies to the Serbian forces besieging Dubrovnik.

A triple metallic click caught his attention. Turning his head toward Roselli, he saw the SEAL point down the beach. Murdock looked in the indicated direction.

Yes! There! Even with the NVDs they were almost invisible against the water, but Murdock could see the rest of the platoon now, a low, black, almost shapeless mass rising and falling with the rolling surf as it made its way steadily shoreward. As it neared the beach, the mass resolved itself into what the Navy called an inflatable boat, small — or IBS for short — and what SEALs usually called a CRRC, for Combat Rubber Raiding Craft. Five men — the rest of Third Platoon's Blue Squad — occupied the raft. An outboard engine was attached to the motor mount, but since even the most silent-running of outboards made some noise, the SEALs had opted to make the approach the old-fashioned way, leaning out over the rubber sides to wield their paddles. At the edge of the surf line, the SEALs rolled out of the craft, snatched it up by its carry handles as though half a ton of IBS and gear was virtually weightless, and dashed through the spray and up onto the beach. Reaching the seawall halfway between Murdock and Roselli, they dropped the raft and began unloading weapons and equipment. Keeping low to avoid showing his head above the wall, Murdock duck-walked across to join the newcomers.

"Lieutenant." The one-word greeting was a whisper, more felt than heard, easily lost beneath the hiss of the surf and the rumble of artillery fire to the west.

"Hey, Mac," Murdock replied as quietly. Master Chief Engineman George "Big Mac" MacKenzie was the oldest of Blue Squad's old hands, an NCO who'd been in the Navy for sixteen years now and in the Teams for eleven. A big-boned, powerfully muscled Texan, he normally hefted Blue Squad's SAW. This op, however, required stealth and speed rather than raw firepower; he'd left his usual M-60 machine gun behind in favor of a sound-suppressed M-16.

"Quiet beach?"

"Nothing so far."

Mac's teeth flashed white in the darkness against the black and green of his paint-smeared face. "Shit, L-T. Half expected to find ACN waiting for us."

The reference was an old in-joke within the Navy's Special Warfare command. When SEALs and Marine Recon personnel had slipped ashore at Mogadishu in 1992, just before America's intervention in Somalia, they'd found a small army of reporters, news cameramen, and lights waiting for them on the beach. SEALs liked to keep a low profile, and the screw-up continued to be a source of wry, sometimes bitter humor within the Teams.

"Looks like we're not going to be on the evening news this time," Murdock replied, grinning. "C'mon. Get the gear broken out and let's diddy."

"Aye, aye, L-T."

It took less than ten minutes for the IBS, twelve feet long, six wide, and weighing 289 pounds minus its load of men and equipment, to disappear completely beneath the loose sand. The five newly arrived SEALs worked furiously while Murdock and Roselli continued to mount watch. The Chemlite sticks were retrieved, stowed, and buried, and two men made their way back down the beach with a pair of brushes, with which they carefully wiped out every footprint, every trace of the team's arrival.

Gathered once more in the shadow of the seawall, the platoon divvied up the gear and weapons they needed to carry with them. Tactical radios were donned and checked, and the squad's HST-4 C2 element sat-comm gear was carefully unpacked. Murdock took advantage of the time to go to each of the men, whispering a few well-chosen words as he checked their rigs and assault vest loadouts.

The TOE roster for SEAL Seven's Third Platoon currently called for two squads — Blue and Gold — of seven men each. For this op, Blue Squad had been assigned to the landing party, while Gold waited in reserve aboard the amphibious assault ship Nassau, now on patrol in the Adriatic a few miles off the coast. Besides Roselli and MacKenzie, Blue Squad included Hull Technician First Class Juan Garcia, the dark-haired demolitions expert known as "Boomer" to the rest; Quartermaster First Class Martin "Magic" Brown, the team's sniper; Electrician's Mate Second Class William Higgins, the squad's radioman, whose quiet and somewhat erudite manner had landed him the nickname "Professor"; and Hospital Corpsman Second Class James Ellsworth, whose calling had inevitably given him the handle "Doc."

Good men, all of them. A little wild on liberty, sometimes, especially Doc and Razor, but they were the very best. In their black nomex and heavily laden combat vests, with their camo-painted faces and mismatched assortment of booney hats and watch caps and scarves, they were a frightening-looking lot. The camo paint liberally smeared on their faces — in Magic's case the stuff was pasted on so thick it was impossible to tell that the man was black — gave them all an eerily nightmarish quality. Murdock was proud to be in their number.

He just wished this mission counted for something. The thunder in the west was growing louder, more insistent.

As the final checks were made, Higgins radioed the team's initial entry report over the sat-comm gear, a single code word condensed to a burst transmission fired into the sky by the press of a button. Too tight and too quick for any eavesdroppers to get a fix, the code word would alert both Gold Squad, back aboard the Nassau, and the senior officers of NAVSPECWARGRU-Two and USSOCOM, who were listening in back at the Pentagon, that Blue Squad was on the beach and proceeding with the mission.

Ready now, their swim gear buried in the sand with the IBS, their weapons and combat loads checked out and ready, the SEALs one by one rolled over the top of the wall, then hurried across the highway. On the far side was open forest. The squad moved in patrol order, five meters between each man. Boomer took point, followed by Mac, the compass man with the GPS. Next came Murdock, then Higgins with the radio. Doc, Razor, and Magic brought up the rear. Only the point man and the tail gunner wore NVDs; the goggles could be hard on the eyes if they were worn for an extended period of time, and for a long trek through the night Murdock wanted the majority of the squad to have full use of their peripheral vision.

Their destination lay some six kilometers inland, just across the border.

Nearly all of this part of the Dalmatian coast had originally belonged to Croatia. The bulk of that state lay well to the north, enfolding Bosnia-Hercegovina between the slender horns of a crescent. Here, the southern horn dwindled away to almost nothing, a thin sliver of beach and coastal highway that isolated Bosnia from the sea save for one narrow passage at Neum, between Dubrovnik and Split.

West and south of Bosnia lay the new Federated Republic of Yugoslavia — which was to say Serbia and a scattering of smaller states from Vojvodina in the north to Montenegro and Macedonia in the south. Of all the Yugoslav republics, Serbia had kept the closest semblance to the old Communist regime and had proven itself more than willing to keep fighting to maintain Serbian hegemony over the Balkans.

And squarely between the Federated Republic and Croatia lay tragic Bosnia-Hercegovina, a triangular block of mountainous land both shared and claimed by Croats, Serbians, and Muslim Bosnians. It was there that the Yugoslav civil war had been most savagely fought since early 1991, there that the world had first heard the sickening phrase "ethnic cleansing." Now Bosnia was being divvied up between the Serbs and the Croats, with eager help from Bosnian Serbs openly armed and supported by the remnant of the Yugoslav federation. Lately, Serbians and Croatians, after a period of halfhearted cooperation against the Muslims, had begun fighting each other again, squabbling over the dismembered corpse of Bosnia as the UN, NATO, and the United States all helplessly watched, proposed partition plans, and attempted to impose laughably short-lived truces. The resulting tangle of territories defined by ethnic groups, religions, and nationalistic loyalties made even the most convoluted gerrymanderings of political districts back in the States look tame by comparison.

Like many Americans, Murdock had for a long time been uncertain about just what role the United States should play in the Balkans, when he thought about it at all. On the one hand were the stories of the atrocities, especially those reportedly committed by the Serbs against the Muslims — stories of whole village populations rounded up, packed aboard cattle cars, and shipped to concentration camps where starvation, beatings, torture, and mass executions were being used to exterminate an entire people. Stories of children being thrown beneath tank tracks, stories of the wholesale slaughter of men and the systematic rape of women, in a campaign designed to empty entire districts for Serb occupation.

Stories, in other words, that sounded chillingly like another type of "ethnic cleansing" carried on by another supposedly civilized nation half a century earlier.

On the other hand, there was the feeling that the United States had no business getting involved in this quagmire. The animosities in this tortured hodgepodge of states and peoples went back a long, long way. Those mountains looming into the eastern sky had been bathed in blood time after time over the centuries. The anarchist who'd started World War I by assassinating Archduke Ferdinand had done so on the anniversary of a Serbian defeat at the hands of the Ottoman Turks in 1389. The Serbs still called the Bosniaks "Turks," bringing to mind the centuries of misrule by the Ottoman Empire. These people had long memories.

Could anything the United States did make any difference here at all?

Murdock didn't know… and, in fact, the politics of this war, the decisions in Washington that had brought him onto this beach, were not his concern. He and his men had a mission to carry out.

According to the briefing Third Platoon had received yesterday aboard the Nassau, this particular stretch Of Croatia, together with most of the former Bosnian territory inland, was now under the control of the Serbian Volunteer Guard — a local militia unit composed of pro-Serb Bosnians — and a Serbian motorized infantry brigade. The Serbs were trying yet again to seize Dubrovnik. When Yugoslavia had started breaking up in 1991, Croatia had grabbed all of the former Yugoslav naval bases save one, the Montenegran port at Kotor, sixty kilometers east of Dubrovnik. Now, the Serb-dominated Yugoslav Republic was trying to get some of those ports back, as well as to seize the initiative in the squabble with Croatia over the Bosnian corpse.

A rusted wire fence marked the official boundary between Croatia and Bosnia, but since the entire area was under Serbian control at the moment, the border was not patrolled. After a careful reconnaissance, searching for mines, patrols, or automated sensors, the SEALs crossed the wire into Bosnia halfway between the village of Mjini and Cilipi International, the shut-down airport twenty kilometers east of Dubrovnik.

There'd been a number of SEAL ops into the Balkans in recent months, all of them highly classified, with missions ranging from scouting out antiaircraft batteries to pulling full recons on stretches of the Adriatic coast that might become landing beaches if the decision was made to send in the Marines. Blue Squad's orders this night were to slip ashore unseen, rendezvous at the St. Anastasias Dominican monastery with a local contact in the pay of the CIA, and collect from him a list of Serbian units in the area and their deployments. The information might — might — be useful soon, in the event that the President decided to punish Serbian aggression by ordering air strikes.

A spook job, then. The SEALs and the Company had a long working partnership, one begun during World War II between the SEALs' forerunners in the old Underwater Demolition Teams and the CIA's predecessors with the OSS. Though he'd been on plenty of intelligence ops before — maybe because he'd been on plenty of them before — Murdock didn't like this sort of mission. For one thing, the civilian agency rarely had its priorities straight. Agency suits were as likely to request some routine bit of intel-gathering that could as easily have been handled by satellite as they were to load the team down with a dozen conflicting mission requirements, an often deadly misuse of assets. For another, Langley too often showed a nasty tendency to regard combat teams as expendable.

Murdock did not regard his men as expendable. He'd argued hard against this mission when Captain Coburn, SEAL Seven's skipper, had asked him to take it on. In the end, he'd accepted it, though. While SEAL commanders were notorious throughout the Navy for their willingness to argue orders that they considered impossible or suicidal, mission refusals nonetheless didn't look good on a Team's quarterly reports. It could mean cuts in the NAVSPECWAR budget, and with the fierce competition for money in a fast-shrinking military, that could mean the end of careers, even the end of the Teams.

Beyond the wire border was a pine forest and the start of a steep climb up the southern flank of Gora Orjen, the forest-covered line of mountains that walled the coastal strip off from the interior highlands between Dubrovnik and Kotor. As Murdock started to climb, he wondered if survival of the SEALs had really come down to nothing more than this, the willingness of low-man-on-the-totem-pole officers like himself to accept dubious missions.

Well, at least his was not one of those Agency Rambo ops piggybacking everything onto the field team from beach reconnaissance to a hostage rescue. Blue Squad had a single objective this time, a single mission to carry out. According to Frank Fletcher, the Agency's combat team handler aboard the Nassau, it was a quick-in, quick-out piece of cake. Murdock would have felt more confident of that assessment had he not known that a hell of a lot of similar ops had gone badly wrong in the past. "A piece of cake," in Company parlance, all too often was rock-hard, fire-hot, and frosted with blood.